robert m. pirsig

· The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.

· Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a 30,000 page menu and no food.

·Traditional scientific method has always been, at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

· Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

Family Father was a law lecturer and mother was Swedish-born. Pirsig married Nancy Ann James in 1954. They had two sons: Chris, and Ted, now 48. Now married to journalist Wendy Kimball, with whom he has a 25-year-old daughter, Nell.

Education Judged to have an IQ of 170 at age nine. Went to University of Minneapolis at 15, but joined the army in 1946, serving in Korea before returning to the university to study philosophy. Then studied at Benares in India.

The Seventies bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the biggest-selling philosophy book ever. But for the reclusive author life was bitter-sweet - hetalks frankly here about anxiety, depression, the death of his son and - the road trip that inspired a classic.

Hmm. One time I had a dream where I was swept up and away by a group of spirits. They took me to meet Bob Pirsig. And he didn't look, in my dream, as he does in the pictures–either this one, or other images onthe internet. But he was speaking with a blond woman when I arrived (a place with cubicles, where he was seated and talking with the woman). So he excused himself ( couldn't really hear what they were saying), and came over andjust said, “Hi.” No conversation. That was the whole thing. Then he went back to continue his conversation with the blond woman. This was before the book, Lila was published. Sincereading that book, I've always thought the woman was Lila, or his meditation of Lila.

11 months later Martha said

After thinking about it more, perhaps the person I met (and the dream did include an actual introduction-briefly) was “Bob Pirsig” but also the meditation of his main character from himself–in relation to and withLila.

There have been more copies of Pirsig’s classic printed than the Koran, albeit not as many as the Bible. The essence of the difference between them, however, being that both the Bible & the Koran and all others of the same genre lay down a code of interpretation of life which prescribes to other third party viewpoints & perspectives; whereas ZEN & AofMM describes the first person perspective of the experience of Pirsig's own journey to find the truth.

"There is no objective reality outside us as opposed to a subjective world within. There is one reality, which manifests itself objectively outside of us and subjectively within, but which itself is beyond the distinction of subject or object, and is known when the human mind transcends both sense (by which we perceive the "outside" world) and reason (by which we conceive the mental world of science and philosophy) and discovers the Reality itself, which is both being and consciousness in an indivisible unity." - Bede Griffiths

"IT IS QUALITY, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know" - Robert Pirsig